WHEN YOUR SIDE HUSTLE TAKES OVER

So my little side hustle hobby, shooting weddings suddenly went crazy, with two years’ worth of Covid cancellations crammed into one summer. It was crazy! It was fun! But sometimes, maybe it was just a little bit much.

Read on, if you dare.

Three weddings in three days when the thermometer didn't go below 30? Seriously? Yes indeed. And I lived to tell the tale.

London, 4.30am. You are awake. The kind of familiar wide awake you know means you wont get back to sleep. You take your coffee in the delicious Mediterranean cool of your garden. This is nice, you think. Perhaps it wont be so bad.

East Sussex, 10.00am. You step out of the car into the oven-like heat of a Mediterranean afternoon. The air con in your car has not prepared you for this sucker punch. You have three days of this. Three days in which you will barely taste air conditioning except when you can escape back to your car. Three days in which, in your crumpled black linen and sandals, you resemble the frightful lovechild of a middle-aged Jesus roadie and a baked potato .

In her room, the bride glistens. Despite the nine thousand fans ranged around the room, the other photographer drips. His glasses have steamed up. You dont dare check your own sodden appearance. You shoot prep, you make Dad jokes, you make for the venue, where the ground is so dry your sandalled feet resemble the dusty, gnarled stumps of a long-dead desert nomad. The ceremony is mercifully short and sweet and in a woodland glade. This wont be so bad, you think.

Wrong again. The speeches are an hour long, in a barn, and you cannot position yourself near a fan. The human body is 90% water, and 89% of it is now pooled and soaked in your pants, the contents of which, are slow-roasted lychee in syrup.

You head out into a field for sunset shots. There are horses. In the last magical, romantic golden light of the day, the groom lifts his bride’s lovely veil, and a clump of horse poo clings to it for a moment before plopping to the ground. So magical.

Haywoods Heath 4.30am. Yes you are awake. Again. You try to set your alarm on your stupid new phone but now you have to go through the health app and 97 different settings so yes, ten minutes later you are again wide awake at dawn. You hit gridlock at the M25, fizzing with caffeine. Your bladder is a bubbling cauldron of pain.

Elstree, 10.00am. Again, despite fans everywhere, the room is a fetid heat trap. There are small children everywhere, lolling and crawling and bumping into things. And then poo once more enters the frame. The ominous warm smell of it. For one terrible paranoid moment you think, could that somehow be me? Then you spy the sagging nappy of a toddler, with equal parts relief and dismay. Someone please change it, dont make me ask. Dont make me DO it.

The ceremony is short but chaotic. The children cry and chatter and interrupt. They will do this for the rest of the day, making everything we do take twice as long. Despite your fool hat and sunblock, by 3pm your face is a ripe tomato. You catch a glimpse of yourself, farmer’s tan, linen trousers rolled up, Robinson Crusoe on a bad day. You go to try to cool off in the car but scald yourself on the molten door handle.

Essex, 10.00am. It’s day three in the Adam house (well we are actually at a swanky golf club) and your main emotion is sheer relief you’re not dead, old man, not dead yet. Who will buy this wonderful morning? A bride who will be an hour late for her own ceremony, that’s who. A bride who will then spend three hours changing for her traditional THREE HOUR LONG Nigerian ceremony, a wonderful but chaotic scrum of chanting and drumming and exhortations and avowals of love and loyalty, but you dont care because your arteries are like blocked drains, your fingers and toes are overcooked sausages, and your underpants contain a frothy, sloshing gulab jamun of hot testicle and EVERY PART OF YOUR BODY WAILS IN PAIN.

10.30pm. The car park. Your car aircon blow dries your throbbing head and gradually erases the odour of armpits, sandwiches and feet. You have survived. You dream of the glass of wine awaiting you at home. You will never do three weddings back to back ever again.

And yes, the horse below is the one.

adam rowleyFebruary 16, 2023weddings, weddingvideography, weddingphotography, horse, sunset, hampshire, covid, summerComment

Mar 21, 2023

HOW MUCH DOES A CORPORATE VIDEO COST?

YOU KNOW WHAT YOU WANT TO SAY AND HOW YOU WANT TO SAY IT, BUT WHAT IS YOUR BUDGET?

How much will my film cost? Is inevitably our first question. The unhelpful answer is of course, how long is a piece of string? You may want a simple one-day, one-man shoot with a quick one-day edit, and you can probably get that for under a grand if you’re not too fussy and it really is just a one-day edit. Or you might want an ambitious creative concept, with lots of pre-production followed by a complex week-long shoot, filming on a RED camera, and lots of complicated compositing and animated graphics. And that could be £20 - £30 000. Or more.

Mar 20, 2023

WHY YOU HIRE A PROFESSIONAL PHOTOGRAPHER

So here’s the cruel irony. Even though I know I possess the kind of staggering youthful good looks that make people catch their breath and drop their falafel when they meet me in real life, on camera I look like a laboratory experiment where the mad scientist has injected the DNA of Brendan Gleason and Charles Manson into a old potato

And being self-conscious - oh my crooked smile, oh my seventy-eight chins - means I forget that my delicious eyes are like limpid emerald pools you could drown in, and I project discomfort - In short, I don’t pose well. Maybe you do. Millions of others dont. And some of them work for you.

Mar 16, 2023

TESTIMONIAL VIDEOS, WHAT ARE THEY GOOD FOR?

WHY THE BEST WAY TO SELL YOUR PEOPLE IS TO USE YOUR PEOPLE

Back in the mists of time, every corporate video had an ambitious narrative, like a storyboarded long-form commercial, a piece of expensive, styled, authored creative in its own right. These films do still get made and they are great. I make them myself, though more usually I work in short form. Is this always how you want to disseminate your information, your brand, your company? Sometimes yes. Just as sometimes you want to Ronseal it, to say it like it is. But do you want to be that blunt? Again probably not.

WHY SPEND MONEY ON A PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGRAPHER?

WHAT VALUE DOES A PROFESSIONAL VIDEOGRAPHER ACTUALLY BRING TO THE PARTY?

Sure so this is where you get sold all the corporate and advertising cliches about brand identity and adding value to your message and blah blah blah. And you may not be thinking in those terms, but rather about just demonstrating something seemingly quite simple.

CAN ONE PERSON SHOOT PHOTOGRAPHY AND VIDEOGRAPHY AT AN EVENT?

YOU NEED A PHOTOGRAPHER , AND YOU ALSO WANT A CORPORATE VIDEOGRAPHER, BUT YOUR BUDGET PAYS FOR ONLY ONE OF THEM - WHAT DO YOU DO?

The short answer is of course some people can do both. The challenge is finding someone who is genuinely good at both, which is not as easy as it sounds. There are plenty of great photographers out there who can’t really shoot video. There are some good videographers out there, though they are no nearly so easy to find, and some of them are competent photographers too.

Mar 5, 2023

WHY EITHER EVERYONE OR NO ONE NEEDS TO WORRY ABOUT AI

With the announcement that China-based NetDragon Websoft says it is the first company in the world to appoint an AI as its CEO only to see stocks soar, naturally it isn’t just struggling bloggers and graphic designers who are worried about the implication of AI

This is where I’d like to reassure you that climate change ravaging the planet and making the lives of those few who survive the catastrophic flooding, wild fires and raging hurricanes that are predicted absolute hell.

WHEN YOUR SIDE HUSTLE TAKES OVER

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